Pursuant to an exemplary scenario, in multimedia applications, bits generated during the encoding of multimedia data may be minimized while a perceptual quality of the multimedia data is maximized. Multimedia data may be heterogeneous, implying a varying degree of complexity from one multimedia picture to another multimedia picture in a multimedia sequence. An example of a multimedia sequence is a collection of consecutive multimedia pictures with all multimedia pictures in the multimedia sequence belonging to the same or a different scene. The variation of complexity may be observed, for example, in the case of video security applications wherein large durations of minimal activity may occur along with small isolated durations of high activity. This results in a high variation of complexity between the low activity and high activity multimedia pictures. Varying degrees of activity/complexity renders it difficult to achieve a desired bit rate over the duration of the multimedia sequence. Furthermore, maintaining the desired bit rate over both the low complexity and high complexity durations of the multimedia sequence may result in severe multimedia quality degradation.